Revered as two of the greatest spiritual figures in the history of man, Jesus
Christ and Buddha forged and articulated the precepts that would form the
ideological foundations of the Christian and Buddhist religions. From what were
austere beginnings, these visionary doctrines evolved over time into universal
forces in their own right. Only a handful of other belief systems have influenced
the lives of so vast a number of people throughout the world to the extent that
these two great religions have.

In appreciating what Christianity and Buddhism stand for in the eyes of their
followers, it is important to understand the doctrinal association that exists
between the two faiths. Although Western scholarship has acknowledged the
similarities that link some of the teachings and beliefs of Christianity with those
of the two other monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism, it has subordinated
the notion of a fundamental relationship between those teachings and beliefs with
their counterparts in Buddhism. Guilty, perhaps, of what could be called shallow
historiography or deliberate obscurantism, scholars in the West have channeled
the gist of their attention and assent on the divisions that separate Buddhism and
Christianity.

The book Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, however, runs against
that scholarly tendency as it de-emphasizes the distinctions between Christianity
and Buddhism and discerns a remarkable similitude in their teachings. Whereas
previous scholarship attempted to minimize the amount of discourse on the
subject, a meaningful correlation between the two religions is the essential
proposition being tendered in Jesus and Buddha. Buddhist writer Jack
Kornfield eloquently sums up this correspondence when he writes about the
efficacy of Jesus' and Buddha's teachings in the book's introduction: "When we
listen deeply to their words, we find that in many ways, they speak with one
heart."

Jesus and Buddha's co-editor, Jesus scholar Marcus Borg, partitions the
book-the main body of which is comprised of some of Jesus' and Buddha's most
famous sayings-into twelve categories that conform with where the two prophets'
teachings appear to closely intersect. Borg maintains that the spiritual kinship
shared between both men took shape before either one of them were even
conceived to the world. In the Digha Nikaya (Collection of Long Discourses),
one of the renowned texts of the Buddhist canon, some devas urge
Queen Maya, after she had given birth to the infant Buddha, to celebrate for "a
mighty son has been born to you." Along similar lines in the Gospel of Luke, the
Angel Gabriel reveals to the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to the one "who
will be called the Son of the Most High."

One of the categories in Jesus and Buddha is entitled "Materialism."
We are reminded here of both men's unwavering antipathy towards the material
world. Gnostic in tone, the Buddha preached that an individual's insatiable
appetite for material wealth and physical pleasure must be purged before he or she
can live a life of virtue, and therefore embark upon the path to nirvana.
Buddha also says in the Jatakamala that "Riches make most people greedy,
and so are like caravans lurching down the road to perdition." In an excerpt from
the Udanavarga, Buddha cautions us to bear in mind that death is the great
levelling force of the cosmos, as he declares that even "though one accumulates
hundreds of thousands of worldly goods, one still succumbs to the spell of death."

Jesus' sayings on materialism are certainly identical in spirit, if not in
composition, with Buddha's. As a champion of the poor, Jesus experienced
first-hand what he perceived to be the hard-hearted, sacrilegious ethos of his time.
Distressed by this cold reality, he formed an image of "personal enrichment" that
was to be "found in heaven rather than in the marketplaces of the world." As
written in the Gospel of Matthew and as indicated in Jesus and Buddha,
Jesus taught that in order to become perfect, you must "sell your possessions, and
give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." These
humanistic tenets-including the famous saying, "Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God."-have great resonance in the world we live in
today.

Both men also resemble each other a great deal in their respective teachings
on love. Jesus and Buddha treats this category-entitled "Compassion"-as
the most conspicuous area of convergence for Buddhist and Christian thought. As
is written in the book, "Both teachers invoked the Golden Rule of treating others
as you want them to treat you." Burnett Hillman Streeter, an Oxford scholar, is
quoted in Jesus and Buddha as saying that "The moral teaching of
Buddha...has a remarkable resemblance to the Sermon on the Mount."

The Sermon, a focal point in the life of the adult Jesus, is replete with
sayings that appear to be a genuine reflection of what is put forth in Buddhism's
principal text, the Dhammapada ("Religious Sentences"). Jesus for
example, is purported to have said in the Gospel of Luke to "Do to others as you
would have them do to you." The comparison with the Dhammapada is
extraordinary when we read that the Buddha, in like fashion, instructed his
followers to "Consider others as yourself."

Although it is hardly Jesus and Buddha's intent to do so, its proposition
of a close doctrinal parallelism between Christianity and Buddhism gives rise to a
hitherto devalued religio-historical controversy. The book directs us to a minority
of scholars who posit that the doctrinal affinity between both religions is the result
of "cultural borrowing." If any such borrowing truly took place, then, as Marcus
Borg concedes, "the direction of borrowing would have been from the Buddha to
Jesus," since the historical Buddha lived some five centuries before the birth of
Christ.

To its editor's credit (Borg after all, calls himself a "non-exclusivist
Christian"), Jesus and Buddha makes several references to specific scholarly
works that were written in defense of the idea that Jesus was influenced by what
Thomas Cahill, the author of the bestselling How the Irish Saved Civilization,
calls "the quiet refinements of Buddhism." Jesus and Buddha briefly
discusses the theories broached in these scholarly works, which claim to resolve
the question of how Jesus was exposed to an ideology that maturated thousands of
miles away from his homeland of Palestine.

Curiously, Borg dismisses the concept of cultural borrowing as a viable
explanation for the parallels in Christian and Buddhist thought. He chooses
instead to attribute the parallels to a "commonality of religious experiences." By
doing so, Borg conveniently sidesteps the possibility that Buddhist doctrines were
transmitted to Palestine. That is to say, he rules out the possibility that Buddhist
thought was physically conveyed across the great trans-continental distance that
lies between Palestine and northern India, which is where Buddhism originated
from. If true, it is more than likely that this transmission was conducted by various
travelers who journeyed amidst the lands between the Middle East and the Indian
subcontinent during ancient times, as well as during the time of Christ.

As an analogy, there is substantial evidence showing that the sources of some
of Christianity's most sacred beliefs, such as the Resurrection of Christ, are to be
found in the pre-Islamic Persian religions of Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. It is
believed that Mithraic and Zoroastrian doctrines were disseminated by wayfarers
and traders from Persia in the Holy Land, where they were then incorporated into
what was to become the Christian faith.

As much as the book Jesus and Buddha deals with issues that leave to
chance how Christianity and Buddhism are rendered by the individual, collective,
and historical imagination, it comes down to being a spiritual guide for those who
seek moral instruction and inner strength from the best of what both religions
have to offer. In coming together "in an encounter of the spirit in the West," as
Jack Kornfield writes, Buddha's and Jesus' words are designed to lead the
faithful on the same "path of liberation from our anxious grasping, resurrection
into a new way of being, and transformation into the compassionate life."